


When Thirteen

by May



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alcohol, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-27
Updated: 2014-08-27
Packaged: 2018-02-15 01:41:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,047
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2210928
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/May/pseuds/May
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When she was thirteen, Rose was a little younger than you thought she was and maybe a lot younger than she thought she was.</p>
            </blockquote>





	When Thirteen

**Author's Note:**

> Written for a HSWC 2014 bonus round.

When she was thirteen, Rose was a little younger than you thought she was and maybe a lot younger than she thought she was. Back then, how were either of you to know when maturity wasn’t really maturity.

But you don’t understand this until you’re both fifteen and Rose is sitting in front of you, drink in hand and eyes glazed over. She feels both grown and yet weirdly incomplete. You guess it’s just so fucking adolescent of you both.

Rose sighs and her smile is kind of like it used to be, except collapsed. This is where you notice progression, of course. Not when she’s tiny and dark in a tentacle cloud. Not when you were both swinging towards the center of a sun. Not even when you watched her remake herself over and over again from the bone up in the green fires of that sun. But now the only looming spectre is her mother and wow she’s grown. This is probably, in a twisted way, some place for flashback voiceovers, the kind that make Egbert all wobbly-shit and shit, except these would be deeply ironic and in more ways than usual.

Rose talks about apple symbolism and she’s actually kind of like a plant. It grew to a bud all neat but then it started to bloom, all sprouting and neotenous. Sappy green insides.

“Looks like I wandered into a really weird uncharted part of town, tonight,” you say. At this point, you’ve written pages of stuff that stopped existing two years ago. There’s a juggalo in the air-vents. Your ex-girlfriend can smell colors. The best dude for miles is a sentient chess piece. Your sister has some incredible UST with a vampire.

Rose burbles that you should really try some of her alchemised moonshine, but you need to turn her down.

 

The problem is that things just creep up on you. You’re so used to things dangling out of the corner of your eye that you never pinpoint stuff straight on unless you need to hit it. Rose will break things apart to see what’s inside but probably not through a booze-haze.

When Karkat talks about or so much as looks at his friends, it’s with a weird kind of burgeoning anguish. He still sometimes makes you feel like you’re at a race, safely behind a rope. You stick your head out and that’s it. Except instead of decapitation, it’s something to do with gross alien tears. You don’t know much about alien relations but you kind of get that Gamzee left him with some kind of chronic conciliatory blue balls.

Watching Rose, you think you’ve picked up a thread of sympathy.

At some point, later, you run into Rose in one of the meteor’s many grey, panelled corridors. She’s balanced and stiff-limbed, like someone’s gripped a mannequin and is making it totter back and forth on unbending legs. She’s squinting at something in her hands. An unscrolled poster, when you get closer. Specifically, it’s a picture of a centaur.

“Trolls do have some weird artwork,” she says. The word ‘weird’ is stretched a little, not quite on point. It’s not like you’re unused to the uncanny, though.

As far as irony levels go, centaur slots itself into somewhere that’s comfortably old in your mind. You want Rose to enjoy this with. There’s a bunch of spaces on the meteor, a lot of them primed for habitation. Some places are strewn with stuff but still don’t belong to anyone.

There’s one room with a pile of soft things – as troll shit goes, this is the nearest thing you’ve found that resembles an actual bed. There’s minimal shit lying around, but that’s obviously not something you’re unused to, either. Another thing that Karkat does is walk past things without looking at them at all. Like, as in a complete refusal to look at the thing that he’s walking past.

It’s been a long time since you’ve opened a cupboard without being at least a little prepared. Rose flops down on the soft pile. It’s like the mannequin has been put away in the back room, face down and maudlin. Though that would be a gross as shit metaphor to follow to the end, so you stop.

Rose pulls herself up with an unceremonious ‘umph’. She stares at you, and you bet that her vision is blurry as fuck. You’re carrying the centaur poster, still, and it’s curled back in on itself. You stretch it out and stare. Creepy ass veins and plastic-y eyes, but whatever. You’re back to the uncanny valley, again.

Rose laughs, weird and bubbly and in the wrong key. She gawps and stares. “God, the things, the things I could shay about trolls, Dave.” She shifts herself onto one arm, flopping the other upwards. She’s grown lankier, though, and it’s one really visible thing. “They have monster parents and this guy, this guy. He had a centaur dad and then he ended up owning all these posters. I could write essays, Dave. _Esshays_.”

“And Karkat had a crab monster dad. And he’s pretty fucking crabby,” you add. That’s what you can do. “Also, Terezi told me that her mom was a dragon egg who taught her to see and…actually, she didn’t turn out too bad, let’s face it.”

“Relatively…” mumbled Rose. “Kanaya’s is a grub. A virgin version of some kind of ancillililarrry breeding component of their species.”

You nod. That sounds appropriate, somehow. It occurs to you that there’s probably a whole lot of symbolic representative shit in those signs – it stretches out. “What even is Gamzee’s, anyway?”

Rose props herself up on her elbow, her hair falling into her face. She puffs a breath of air in contemplation.

“Goat.”

You don’t have much to join together, there, but it makes as much sense as anything. “I’m gonna try my hand at this…” you say. “But I don’t know what to say beyond it’s a great oedipal clusterfuck for everyone. Reach-around, even.”

Rose pulls herself upright, red cheeked – whatever she was drinking brings up rosy blotches on her skin like a fucking cartoon – and then she leans forward and gently pants your face.

She flops back down, after that, and you hear her begin to snore in good rhythm.


End file.
